After three big road games, the Oilers rookies are moving up the scoring race. Although leading the league in total rookie points is not a guarantee of winning the ROY, it certainly helps. Being famous and scoring ridiculous goals that make Sportsentre's Plays of the Day/Week/Month also help. The Oilers have two strong candidates.

Winning the Calder would be historic for Hall or Eberle. For all the phenomenal talent that Oiler fans have watched over the years, none won the Calder (which is as ridiculous as it sounds). Maybe the hockey Gods owe us one, but it looks to me as though one of these two kids could win it outright:

Jeff Skinner (CAR) 24gp, 7-12-19 -4

Jordan Eberle (EDM) 25gp, 5-13-18 -1

Logan Couture (SJS 24gp, 10-5-15 +2

Derek Stepan 27gp, 6-9-15 -1

Taylor Hall 25gp, 8-6-14 -2

There are other candidates (Shattenkirk, Subban and Carlson among the D and goalie Bobrovsky is dynamite). Having said all that, it looks like the Oilers are going to have a really good shot at winning this thing. The best chance since maybe Jason Arnott over a decade ago.

I don't like to spend a lot of time on newer stats at ON, but this is an important item. RelCorsi measures total shots for and against while specific players are on the ice. This measurement goes back decades, innovative coaches were using it in the 1970's. Here are the relCorsi's for the 5 players above. I should mention that Corsi is a tool best used to compare players on the same team, but it does show a strong trend:

Hall (EDM) +14.8

Eberle (EDM) +10.4

Logan Couture (SJS) +9.2

Derek Stepan (NYR) +3.6

Jeff Skinner (CAR) +0.9

Hall and Eberle are playing against tough competition and the puck is going the right way. Music! I'm hopeful one of these young men wins some hardware, it would be a solid indicator for the future. But in reality we already have it.

Let the good times roll.

Lowetide has been one of the Oilogosphere's shining lights for over a century. You can check him out here at OilersNation and at lowetide.ca. He is also the host of Lowdown with Lowetide weekday mornings 10-noon on TSN 1260.

Agreed on Horc, always vocal on the bench - and when coming back defensively he will point with his stick to Ebs and Hall where to go defensively.

Horc as a player is worth 4-4.5 mil/year in my eyes. The extra 1-1.5 for being a trainer on the ice, steady room presence, and captain is fine by me. Hell we pay $700k to Strudwick to be just that type of thing - and he cant even play hockey anymore.

The calder is no indicator of sucess, for example, Stamkos did not win the calder, but in retrospect, he is the most dominant rookie from that year.
Horcoff is becoming a much better playmaker than I ever gave him credit for, he sets up those rookies pretty nicely, not a great shooter, but a good set up man.

That's what he's always been regarded as is a playmaker ~ says so on every year of NHL gaming~